Elon Musk announces new artificial intelligence company ‘xAI’ 

Elon Musk has officially joined the AI ​​race with the launch of a new company called xAI – after years of claiming the technology will be humanity’s downfall.

The Twitter boss didn’t share many details, but revealed that xAI is designed “to understand the true nature of the universe.”

The xAI team consists of members who previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla.

The company’s sparse website says more information will be shared in a live Twitter Space on Friday.

“Announcing the creation of @xAI to understand reality,” Musk said in a tweet at 12:23 a.m. ET.

He then shared another post highlighting how the date of xAI’s release is in honor of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Adding the month, day, and year gives you “42.”

The number is a supercomputer’s answer to “the ultimate question about life, the universe and everything.”

Musk wrote, “And what are the most fundamental unknown questions? Once you know the right question, the answer is often the easiest, as my hero, Douglas Adams, would say.”

Tesla’s CEO registered a company called X.AI Corp. incorporated in Nevada in March, according to a state filing.

The company lists Musk as its sole director and Jared Birchall, the general manager of Musk’s family office, as secretary.

And the company’s official Twitter account went live in May, but somehow managed to stay under the radar.

Many of the founders are proficient with large language models.

The xAI team consists of Igor Babuschkin, a DeepMind researcher, Zihang Dai, a research scientist at Google Brain, and Toby Pohlen, also of DeepMind.

Musk has been one to criticize AI over the years, with his most notable attack on the technology coming in March when he and more than 1,000 other industry leaders called for a pause in the “dangerous race” to develop AI, which they fear will a ‘major risk to society and humanity’ and could have ‘catastrophic’ consequences.

Musk used Twitter to announce xAI. Many of the founders are proficient with large language models

The group has signed an open letter asking for a six-month break so that more risk assessment can be done.

And the Twitter boss signed another in 2015 with the late Stephen Hawking, who warned that without safeguards on intelligent machines, humanity could face a dark future.

While Musk is a big critic of AI, he revealed in April that he had plans to launch “the third option” for Microsoft and Google, called “TruthGPT.”

The announcement was made to Tucker Carlson.

Because of Musk’s belief in free speech, the new bot product could have less left-wing bias than ChatGPT, which has already been criticized for “awakened” responses.

He also accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI security seriously.

However, the billionaire also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying “AI is more dangerous than poorly managed aircraft design or production maintenance or poor car manufacturing,” the excerpts read.

“It has the potential of destroying civilization,” he said.

xAI isn’t Musk’s first AI company, as he co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board of directors in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he was leaving OpenAI to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.